This Week in the Business: 'Wii U's Fisher-Price Take on Tech Seems a Bit Desperate.'

This Week in the Business: 'Wii U's Fisher-Price Take on Tech Seems a Bit Desperate.'What’s happened in the business of video games this past week …

QUOTE | “Wii U’s Fisher-Price take on tech seems a bit desperate.”—Rob Fahey, former editor of GamesIndustry.biz, talking about the Wii U and how no one knows if it will ultimately succeed or fail.

QUOTE | “It’s good, but it’s not great. And we really need these new pieces of hardware to be great.”—Peter Molyneux, famed game designer, talking about the Wii U and how it’s in competition with so many game platforms.

QUOTE | “I do have to wonder if the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 picked up some users due to the Wii U shortage.”—EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich, talking along with other analysts, about the Wii U’s launch week sales and how Microsoft and Sony capitalized.

STAT | 400,000—Number of Wii U’s sold during Black Friday Week, according to Nintendo; the Wii sold about 300,000 units during the same week after its launch.

QUOTE | “What digital delivery does is it makes the art of listening to your player utterly central to your life.”—Don Daglow, game industry veteran, talking about how massive changes will and will not affect the game industry.

QUOTE | “No one realizes that a lot of these apps that come out sell tiny numbers of copies… So they just put a year of their life into something that sold basically nothing.”—Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, talking along with others about the dearth of info about digital product sales and how it hurts the game industry.

STAT | 525,000—Number of PS3’s Sony sold during Black Friday week, according to Sony; the company also sold over 160,000 PS Vitas in that same period.

QUOTE | “It’s a ruthless platform and there’s just no room for anything except perfection.”—Ed Rumley, COO of Chillingo, talking about how difficult the mobile game market is and what developers need to do to succeed.

STAT | 750,000—Number of Xbox 360 consoles sold during Black Friday week, according to Microsoft; Xbox Live Gold subscription sales jumped more than 50% compared to last year.

QUOTE | “We tend to just do our own thing without focusing too much on what everyone else is up to.”—Shelley Pearce, Nintendo UK director of marketing and PR, talking about the Wii U launch and how Nintendo doesn’t pay attention to Sony and Microsoft.

STAT | 15%—Amount that a major analyst suggests Call of Duty: Black Ops II sales could be down over last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 sales; this would be the second year in a row the latest CoD title sells less than the previous year.

QUOTE | “Microsoft …may have a shot at becoming a mobile gaming powerhouse.”—Matt Haggerty, Swarm co-founder, talking about mobile games and what might happen if Microsoft could connect the Xbox with Windows Phone.

QUOTE | “The game business is going through the single biggest inflection point since its birth.”—Greg Richardson, CEO of Rumble Entertainment, talking about the challenges of creating a new game publisher when everything is changing.


This Week in the Business courtesy of GamesIndustry International
(Image from Shutterstock)

Originally written and published by By Steve Peterson at Kotaku. Click here to read the original story.
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